As someone who's worked extensively on both the publisher side and developer side of the industry, Fries has unique insight into the difficulties both can encounter. With game budgets on the rise and publishers worried about losing investments on costly next-gen projects, it can be tough for all involved. "I'm really aware of the pressures on both sides," said Fries. "You know, the pressures to make money, and to meet schedules, things like that... It's kind of funny, you look at a company like Blizzard and they do so many things right, but what they do is just refuse to release anything until it's ready, until it's great. That sounds so easy, but there are so many forces – monetary or political or whatever – that [get in the way]. And even Blizzard has to fight these battles, both externally and internally, to be able to do what we all know is the right thing. Valve is another company that's done a great job in fighting that fight. To me, it's that fight that's the key."

Interestingly, despite the pressure from publishers, the constant threat of industry consolidation, the increasingly divided portfolios between core and casual titles since the advent of the Wii and DS, Fries remains optimistic about Airtight as an independent developer making triple-A games. "I see a lot of this new stuff coming in as just sort of filling out the spectrum of what's possible with gaming. To me, it's like the victory of video games over the other mediums. That's always been the battle, the fight for people's time; I want them spending time playing games, not watching a sitcom or browsing the web," Fries said. "I think Nintendo is doing a great job expanding who we're reaching. I'm all for that; I think it's great and it creates more opportunities for independent game developers. At the same time, what you see is the companies that are taking the time and spending the money to build really high quality products, those are the ones who are having success. ... What companies aren't going to get away with is shoddy products. Some developers who got away with doing half-assed things won't get away with that anymore because the bar set by the Blizzards and Valves and Bungies of the world is just really, really high."

"I'm also excited by the idea of bringing in outside financing or new funding models in gaming and I'm seeing more and more of that," he added, "so you're right that there's a lot of publisher consolidation but there's also new opportunities that could help offset or replace what we lose when we have big publisher consolidation."

As much as GameDaily BIZ enjoyed talking about Dark Void and industry challenges we had to take the opportunity to also pick Fries' brain about the state of the Xbox business, the Rare acquisition (which he spearheaded) and other Microsoft related topics.

"I still have lots of friends [at Microsoft] and I think they've done a really good job with the release of 360, but I think it's a really interesting battle – a lot more interesting than we thought it might be when we were designing the 360. [Fries laughs] Nintendo obviously has really pulled off a coup... we knew they were heading out in this new and kind of risky direction and we didn't know if it would work, but obviously it's done very well for Nintendo," he said. "At the same time, I'm a hardcore gamer and I'm really happy to have my cutting edge gaming boxes too."

"I think it's obvious that Sony got off to a slow start; I think they made some pretty big mistakes and they've done a good job in the last year in recovering from those; I think they're putting up a much stronger battle now. They've also done a great job in keeping the PS2 business alive, so you've got a lot of happy PS2 customers who are just waiting for the price of PS3 to be right before they switch over. If Sony can keep those guys brand loyal, they will have a lot of people coming over to the PS3.

"It leaves Microsoft in a kind of awkward position because with Sony winning the Blu-ray battle, it's nice to have a hi-def player as part of your games machine, and now that that's the standard I think it's a big advantage for Sony. It kind of pushes Microsoft into a box where the main the thing that they have [going for them] right now is they can exert price pressure on Sony... I think they can cause Sony some pain by making the 360 a lot more accessible price-wise. So Sony's got the brand on their side and the extra [Blu-ray] capability, but they're always going to be at a price premium versus 360, and a lot of games are available on both, so for many 360 would be the cheaper choice."

While Fries basically acknowledges that Nintendo is "off doing its own thing," it's fairly obvious that both Microsoft and Sony salivate when looking at the cash flowing into Nintendo as a result of the Wii. Both would desperately like a piece of that casual, mass market pie. But Nintendo's approach has its disadvantages, argues Fries. "There's some good and bad about what Nintendo's doing. They've reached out to an audience that isn't [comprised] so much [of] gamers and they don't buy very many games. The tie rate of games per console is pretty important... so that's something from a business model point of view that's going to prevent Microsoft and Sony from being too aggressive in that space," he said. "It's a really interesting battle. I'm glad in a way I'm not part of it. It's fun to watch from the outside and not have to have the stress of being in the middle of it everyday."